


Afterword

by Maige



Category: Hellsing
Genre: Angst and Fluff, Canon Divergence, Canon Typical Violence, Eventual Smut, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Horror, Mutual Pining, PTSD, Supernatural - Freeform, after the war, integra and seras are platonic life partners, mentioned integra/alucard, pip lives au, seras discovering her powers, vampire shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 08:01:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20404354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maige/pseuds/Maige
Summary: After the war, Seras has lost most of those she had come to consider family.After the war, Pip finds himself in a similar situation.Unsurprisingly, as Hellsing works to pull both London and its own organization back together, they find solace in one another.[Being rewritten!]





	Afterword

**Author's Note:**

> SO HI IM REWRITING THIS CUZ I DIDN'T LIKE HOW THE ORIGINAL WORK WAS COMING OUT. Plus I just wanted to rewrite some of the chapters. There were a few things I wanted to focus on, and the original writing wasn't really conveying it - hope you all understand, and I hope all of you who were reading it come back for the rewrite! Changes will come in the form of a few new sentences, some sentences being tweaked, and some whole new scenes being added.  
I'm also planning on trying to get this updated frequently - at the very least these first five chapters will be out quickly as I'm just tweaking them!

The last thing that Pip Bernadotte could remember thinking was that if Seras didn’t come for them now, they were all as good as dead.

The other last sensations came in crystal clear snippets, utilizing all five senses to their fullest potential, as the surreal shots of overpowering adrenaline pulsing through every bit of one’s veins did when in such a situation. He could hear the screams of the few surviving men around him, smell the overtly nauseating copper stench of death as those same men - his own - being murdered and subsequently eaten. Pip only ever had the pleasure of hearing these sounds once before, when that Hitler Youth with the inhuman ears had shown him that dreadful video, and the noises in person were so jawdroppingly dreadful that he wasn’t surprised if they had coaxed him into his faint. Wet, crunching, horrific animalistic screams that no human should ever make reverberating through the hall. 

The only saving grace was that Pip could not see them. The pain, radiating from every cell that made up his person, was keeping him frozen on the ground, staring up at the ceiling. Blood had poured down his good eye anyhow, making it soupy and raw. The last thing he had ever really seen, other than the dilapidated roof above, was his lieutenant dying. It only added to the surreal nature of the scene, confused grief at the knowledge that the man who had been with him since he started taking up the family business, the man who had hunkered down loyally with him in the humid pits of many South American countries to end the lives of some nameless guerilla groups, stayed by him during particularly bad spells after particularly bad jobs (of course, Pip would do the same with him), laughed and joked and argued and teased him when he learned of his Captain’s flourishing infatuation for the female vampire they were working with - would never do that ever again. Now Rick just laid a few feet somewhere to the left of him, midsection crushed all to hell. 

Nearly everyone was dead, and Pip wasn’t sure if he was going to make it himself. Black feathery blobs were starting to touch the edge of his vision, and he broke out into a cold sweat. Eventually all of his remaining conscious thought focused on how if Victoria didn’t get here right now, every single one of the men who made up the Wild Geese were going to be wiped off the face of this Earth. 

He woke up a little over a week later.

It was like waking up suddenly from a dream, the abrupt change from a dark, bloody hallway to a busy, sterile hospital room. Nurses and doctors fussed about the mercenary, running back and forth as they frantically tended to other needy patients. The room itself was small, the medical staff appearing haggard and exhausted. There wasn’t one that didn’t have dark circles stamped under their eyes, but they worked as tirelessly as ever. If Pip hadn’t been so out of it, his brain feeling stuffed with cotton, he would’ve admired their dedication. 

Everything was muddled and hazy, Pip in a horrible daze, tired and sore and if it weren't for the fact that the news on the small TV anchored into the corner of the left sterile wall of his room was broadcasting the massive damage and the frighteningly high casualties London had succumbed to he would've allowed himself to believe everything had been a particularly nasty nightmare. How the hell any news station was managing to broadcast the event, showing sparse, fuzzy images of crumbling buildings and roads painted with red, Pip couldn’t imagine. He watched the tiny screen as the doctor, an elderly man with only a few wisps of white hair atop his wrinkled head, informed him that he had no significant damage, nothing that pain meds, rest and proper care wouldn’t handle. A concussion, a handful of broken bones, some internal damage. Bruised insides. He certainly felt all of it. 

Reality crashed in further when the only other three survivors of the Wild Geese sat beside his bed. Pip didn’t say anything, but he was blown away with amazement in knowing that some of his soldiers had survived the ordeal. 

"She saved us, Cap," one of them said plainly. He was wrapped in bandages and his eyes were wet. He did not have to specify who '_she_' was. "She changed, somehow, and was amazing."

"Something happened to her," the other said. He looked as out of it as Pip had when he first woke up, perhaps high on painkillers. "She looked different. Something happened to her arm. Her eyes were red. We've seen a lot of war but that was something else." He paused. "I think she finally drank blood."

It had been a constant battle between her and her master, and their boss. His Mignonette had vehemently rejected even the possibility of fully drinking blood, taking only a mere drop of their medical supply when she was feeling particularly weak (Pip could recall, at one point, that she had been near fainting due to extreme fatigue, and the captain himself - regardless of the instinctual revulsion at the thought of consuming human bodily fluids - had chided her to the point where he had more than willingly grabbed a syringe and a blood bag). When she drank the mere millimeter, her face had contorted into a spectacular mix of blissful relief and unbridled disgust; clearly less at the taste of the blood, but more that she had to drink it to live.

Seras had once confided in him that her reason for this was because she felt like something in her would be lost once she did it, that last shred of humanity she clung to like a unreplaceable security blanket. At first Pip had found it to be a silly notion, as he - even as a human - became used to the idea of working in the business of death from a young age, and certainly a vampire would take to the guts and gore and drinking blood like a duck would to swimming. 

"She was vicious as all hell," he was told. "She completely destroyed that Nazi fuck! Shaved her head down to nothing like a piece of cheese on a grater on the goddamn hallway wall. It was fucking brutal...and so fast we saw nothing but blood and bone spraying everywhere. Christ."

"But she was worried about you, after," he was also told, and for a moment a foreign warmth pooled into his chest, replacing the cold grief of mourning. "She more or less ordered us to take care of you once she left. Wouldn’t leave until we properly agreed!"

For the first time in a while, Pip's dry lips cracked into a smile, and even though they were clearly in pain, his few friends could not help but mirror it. From the sounds of it, his Mignonette hadn't lost as much of her humanity as she feared, if she still bothered to care so deeply about a half-dead human.

This was further confirmed by his next visitor, who came not a day after he had awoken.

Pip fully expected to see her, seeing as she had survived the whole ordeal. Integra Hellsing was a tough as balls lil lady, and a proper one at that. He knew that she wouldn't let him sit in his hospital bed (as nice as it was - the best care was brought to him, undoubtedly ordered by Sir Hellsing herself) and stew without being properly addressed by the head of the organization he lost his crew with.

The first thing Pip noticed was the eyepatch. That was new.

"We match now," was the first thing he said, cracking a wry smile. Also as expected, she did not smile back.

Instead she pulled a chair over to his bedside, sat and addressed him in her usual serious manner, without taking her coat off. Pip then noticed that she was completely alone, and he wondered where Walter was; but considering the situation, he thought best not to mention it."Mr. Bernadotte. I'm happy to hear that you're recovering well."

There was something in her tone that told him she was speaking only in the physical sense. "Takes more than a Nazi vampire invasion to bring me down, I suppose," Pip replied, still grinning. Humour had always been his instinctive coping mechanism. The world was fucked, he knew it from childhood, and throwing jokes at it always seemed to help. 

Still Integra did not smile. Rather she seemed morose, sad. Seras had told him how awful the elder woman had felt when the soldiers they had replaced were all killed. There was an outpour of emotion one usually did not see in the typically stoic woman, Seras quietly saying how Integra’s face had twisted into an expression she never wished to see again, and although Pip had not been at the funeral of the previous Hellsing staff, he could guess that the look she was now giving him was the look she had then.

His boss (ex-boss?) felt guilty, perhaps crushingly so.

"I can tell. Well, I would like to give my sincerest apologies over your men. Although I know this can do nothing to bring them back, I promise you remaining survivors will be taken care of and will be compensated to the fullest extent. We of the Hellsing organization thank you deeply for your service."

And there it was. Integra's tanned features twitched briefly, her brows knitting together. She had bowed her head slightly, a few ribbons of her long hair pooling over her shoulder. 

Pip shrugged, despite the stint of pain it caused to shoot through his shoulder. "We've had casualties before. I knew that someday we were going to have a hell of a fight that could easily wipe any number of us out. _C'est la vie._" He shrugged again. It hurt more this time, bruised and battered body clamouring at him to stop moving. "I just never guessed it was going to be thanks to vampires." He then let out a small sigh before catching Integra's eye. "There hasn't been an actual funeral yet, _oui_?" Would Integra even conduct such a ceremony for the Geese? 

"Not yet. I thought you'd want to be there."

"I would. _Merci._" The Frenchman leaned back into his plush pillows and flapped his hand dismissively, causing a third jolt of hurt through him. "But enough of that for now." If only because he could not handle it, especially with Integra's sad gaze penetrating through him. "I...also want to know how Seras is. I was told she saved us last few Geese, left to help you, and that's it. I was told the girlie apparently drank blood?"

He wasn't surprised when Integra gave a firm nod, though an odd sort of pride rushed through him. Pip only wished he had been awake long enough to see how she had taken out enemy, a futile longing burning in him to have seen how that bitch had been 'destroyed', as his men had said. He never took joy in seeing the enemy die, preferring to see them as meaningless faces, but good God did he wish he could’ve seen Seras take out that woman. Wish he could’ve seen her grind the other vampire’s face into mush. 

"You heard right. She's finally taken up the mantle of being a full vampire." The same sort of pride he felt was clear in Integra's voice, and showed plainly on her face. "Seras had been an essential piece in ending the attack, and has been doing perfectly fine since. She's currently back in the manor." Integra's one eye moved to the ceiling and she scowled the same sort of scowl she often used with Alucard. "Though, I wouldn't be surprised if she was listening in, regardless of my orders. She's quickly showing herself to be as annoyingly rebellious as her master."

The grin and near-boyish chuckle this prompted from Pip were genuine ones, amused at her reaction; although he wasn't aware of what new powers Seras had obtained through her transformation (in his training he was told that despite most vampires having basic things such as superhuman strength, special varieties of techniques varied between them), and the thought that she could actually be looking in, could maybe even physically see her boss and former captain, made him experience a cross of joy and unease.

He wanted to see her, desperately so. Wanted to see how she looked now, how she held herself up, how she had finally blossomed from that shy, hesitant girl who yelled at him over his filthy songs and flinched at the idea of killing anyone sentient into a powerhouse of a vampire whose strength was vital in making sure this city didn't go down in smoke. But he also didn't want to her to see him like this, still weak and frail and wrapped like a mummy.

Pip swallowed dryly, suddenly aching for a smoke (he had been strictly forced to go cold turkey during the last few days, stern nurses blatantly not falling for his charming words when he inquired about having one little cancer stick), and blurted out his first thoughts, "Fuck, I really want to see her."

Their start had been fucking rocky for sure, Pip in initially blatant fear of the woman he immediately branded as a freak - the splitting headache she had given him after those series of flicks lasted for a full day-, Seras in a constant state of annoyance and harsh words with the Wild Geese leader, neither willing to fully get along. Always at each other's throats, always arguing and scrapping and wanting nothing to do with one another.

...until the clusterfuck of a situation that had been Rio, when for the first time Pip caught sight of that humanity she desperately wanted not to lose. Who he officially thought was a straight-laced monster was upset over the loss of these humans, even cried over them, the officers who fruitlessly tried to kill Alucard in a greedy attempt to gain immortality. He himself had easily put the bullets into the heads of several people only a few hours before and here Seras was, actually grieving over the lives of people who had tried to kill them.

It was naïve, terribly so. But it was then that he learned that Seras didn't actually want all of this, that she didn't have that much choice in the matter of becoming a vampire (either that or an actual death), and truly did not deserve to be in this situation. So, as Pip surveyed her shaking in her boots, looking positively miserable, he made a decision to treat her better. Pip had approached the girl after Alucard disappeared through the wall to look for a way to get out of the shithole country, placing a hand on her shoulder and attempting to ease her. He had spoken quietly, reassuringly, using the same calming tactics he had used on his men after they were shaken up from seeing an especially bad sight. 

“I know it may not seem like it now, but you’re stronger than you think,” Pip had said to her, even as he looked at him with disbelief. He then had given her a lopsided grin before going on, “And if you still don’t believe it, try doing one of those self motivation exercises. Look at yourself in the mirror, and repeat over and over: _‘I’m a badass vampire, and won’t take no shit from anyone!_’” Then he paused, recalling nosferatu folklore. “...or maybe not. Do vampires have reflections?” 

It had been a dumb joke, but she still smiled - those small fangs strangely endearing - and laughed, the combination of the two making him smile dumbly as his heart skipped a beat, and he knew he had made the right decision. 

His former boss gave him a pointed look, the slightest bit of sympathy behind her eye. "I understand that you two had grown close while you were working together, but a reunion will have to wait. I'm afraid I need Seras at the moment, and she's too busy to have personal visits."

Pip opened his mouth to ask 'what about the big scary bastard?' but like with Walter he quickly decided it wasn't appropriate to do so, and set his mouth back into a tight line. He had seen the news, the catastrophic destruction. Hellsing would be the busiest they've been in years, working tirelessly to help clean up and the situation sorted out; not to mention, the manor itself had been trashed fairly hard. He wondered who had to retrieve the bodies of the Geese, scattered about the halls. Splattered and half eaten. Who knows how many had been fully eaten, or who were nothing more than bits of bodies now, unrecognizable. 

"But," Integra continued after seeing the disappointed look on the man's face, "I promise that you will be able to see her. When you are better and we can have guests. It's the least I can do."

Fair enough, Pip still felt like shit. Still covered in nasty green-yellow bruises, scrapes everywhere, gashes that were still healing, bone fractures and cracks that continued to hurt, a concussion that may have been minor but still was a bitch to get through, withdrawal symptoms from the lack of nicotine flowing through his needy lungs. And he was tired. So goddamn tired.

"I don't mind waiting a little longer," he replied hoarsely, before grinning again. "What kind of man would I be if I let the lady see me in this condition, _oui?_ I'd rather be my usual charming and rugged self for our first meeting." The smile dropped somewhat, though he continued to speak with good humour. "Besides, I have a feeling she would kill me with her new vampire powers if I came to her while like this."

To his utter surprise, Integra finally smiled back. It was small, more of a tiny smirk, but it was a rare smile all the same. "Indeed. Seras had been sick with worry about your well being, and I'm sure she'd send you back into a coma if you left the hospital before you were fully better."

The thought that Seras had been deeply concerned with how he was doing, coupled with the fact that the Hellsing head was actually joking with him, made him feel light. It made the harsh, bright lights overhead soften and the oppressive atmosphere of the hospital room melt away, and for a moment Pip felt completely better.

"Ha. I guess I should work to avoid Mignonette's wrath then...will she be there for the funeral?"

"Of course. You well know she wouldn't miss it." And just like that the blonde was back to her serious air again, all furrowed brows and tightly drawn lips. "Depending on our schedule, that might be the first time you're able to see her."

"_D'accord_." It was fine with him. Pip meant it when he said he wanted to get better before being able to meet with Seras, not wanting to upset her. She didn't know the Geese for nearly as long as Pip did, but he could make an educated guess that she was going to grieve at the service as if she'd known them her entire life. Just the kind of person she was.

And honestly, the thought of having Seras there to hold his hand through the whole thing was depressingly appealing.

There was a moment of strangely comfortable silence before Integra stood. She moved like someone decades above her actual age, and Pip nearly moved out of his bed to help her up. "Well. Again, I'm happy to see you're coming along well. And I hope you continue to get better. I will keep in touch and keep you updated."

Pip couldn't find him saying anything in return, only watching as Integra moved to the doorway. She stopped and looked back, wistful and sad again. "Thank you, Mr. Bernadotte."

...For an awful moment Pip wanted to feel terribly angry, wanted to feel that surge of rage and yell about how she shouldn't be thanking him, how really all she was thanking him for was using his friends as a human shield that got them all killed and very nearly failed if it weren't for a vampire actually saving the day; but he could guess that the woman lost loved ones as well from the attack and thought it would be unfair.

Instead he gave her a nod of acknowledgment and an equally sad smile. She left.

Shit was bad, the whole Nazi vampire horrorshow was over but his body as fucked and his mind was fucked and the majority of his comrades were well and gone. His Grandfather had taught him endlessly over how, in this line of work, you and the others around you were expected to end up dying at one point; war was hell and all that, and mass casualties like this have happened before. And going to see Seras meant going back to the place where it began and where it ended.

He leaned further back into his headboard, eyelid growing heavy. PTSD had been something else Pip was taught about, something he definitely experienced before (more so in his first several missions, and in those that were particularly gory and graphic, mostly including children). He wondered if he could even go back there.

Only the thought of blonde hair and what were now said to be red eyes kept him at ease. As Pip's eye closed he thought of her, and the thought of being able to be near her again and hold her and just be able to talk to her, even though it meant going back there, was even more tempting and alluring and_ cravable_ than the nicotine he wanted so badly. He would very well give up filling his lungs with smoke for a lifetime, if it meant he could fill his lungs with the scent of her. 

Before he was lulled into a light sleep, the monotone beeping of the medical machines and people discussing things out in the hallway becoming nothing more than white noise, Pip allowed himself to think that it was going to be perfectly alright as long as Seras was there beside him. It might have been foolish to cling to her in such a way, practically idolizing the girl as a beacon of helping him get through the waves of grief that were only beginning to start - but he had always been a fool when it came to women. 

And when it came to this woman, who eventually came to shower him in the warmth and light of the sun that she could not physically withstand, he would happily cling and idolize, knowing that with her nature, she would help yank him out of the metaphorical muck that was to come. 

Of course, Pip would be all the happy to do the same in return.

**Author's Note:**

> And as always reviews and kudos are super appreciated! Also feel free to say gab about hellsing with me over at my tumblr, maiiart.tumblr.com! ;0


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